Amazon Polly is a service that turns texts into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled applications. Starting today, you can put up to 100,000 characters in an input text using the new asynchronous synthesis task and store the output files in S3. This greatly simplifies the process of voicing long form content like news articles and documents.

Asynchronous synthesis tasks also enable you to incorporate robust Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) tags. Input text can now also contain up to 100,000 characters of SSML tags, and they won’t count towards character limit for input text. This allows for a very high degree of control over the style and expressiveness of large bodies of text, such as blog posts, articles, or even book chapters.

Try the new asynchronous synthesis feature through the Amazon Polly console, or visit the Amazon Polly documentation for more information about the Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs. You can also read more about this feature on Jeff Barr’s Blog.